The Vocal Coach Who Keeps Ariana Grande in Tune — and Taught Timothée Chalamet to Sing
It’s been a great year for theater kids in Hollywood.
Ariana Grande and Timothée Chalamet are two of the biggest names to have scored Oscar nominations this awards season, partly — or some would argue, entirely — down to their impressive vocal work in Wicked and A Complete Unknown, respectively. But what you might not know is the two shared a singing coach for their industry-acclaimed performances.
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“When Ariana or Timothée walk into a room, all the molecules change,” Eric Vetro tells The Hollywood Reporter. “If you had no idea who they were, you would still know, ‘Oh, there’s something special about these people.'”
Vetro is singing coach to the stars. Only a snippet of his resume does all the talking: the New York native has worked with Angelina Jolie (Maria), Renée Zellweger and Emma Stone in their Oscar-winning outings in Judy and La La Land, Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown) and Austin Butler (Elvis). Through word of mouth, Vetro has become Hollywood’s go-to musical mentor.
He has worked with Grande since she was young, only 13, and Chalamet once before on 2023’s Wonka. It was a no-brainer to pull him in for what would be the pair’s biggest roles of their career so far. Rehearsal time varies from three to nine months (as is the necessity to be flexible when you’re combatting studio schedules) but part of Vetro’s methodology is to improve the actor’s own voice for weeks on end before they can begin taking on that of their character’s.
“I’m quite the nag and and quite the party pooper,” Vetro laughs, explaining how he often causes a stir by requesting his student’s dressing room has no fragrant flowers, no lit candles and a humidifier for air moisture. “Everything you eat will affect your voice, everything you drink will affect your voice, even the way you work out in the gym… Going to a ball game? I tell them: ‘Don’t cheer. Cheer silently. You can fist bump, but you can’t yell and scream.’ Going to a concert? ‘Don’t sing along, because the next day you might be hoarse.'”
Grande’s task, he begins, was to achieve a more operatic affect with her voice for Wicked. Her celebrated musical career was one thing, but doing Glinda justice was another. “We worked five days a week for three months just to prepare her for her audition,” Vetro tells THR. “That’s how hard she works.” He compares the process to that of her co-star Jonathan Bailey’s, who Vetro also coached for his role as the devilishly handsome Fiyero in Jon M. Chu’s movie. “With Jonathan, before he had to sing [on set], we would do a FaceTime warm-up,” he says, (“Dancing Through Life is actually really hard.”) With Grande, however, “she could tumble out of bed and sing a high C. She’s just it. Everything was so in her voice. Those songs were so in her body.”
“So many people brought up the fact her comedic talents were on display in Wicked — they didn’t realize she could be that funny,” Vetro adds when asked what audiences might be surprised to know about Grande’s prep. “Anybody who knows her knows she is that funny all the time. But I think part of what made it work so well in the movie is she didn’t have to think about the music or her voice. She worked so diligently for those months leading up to filming and she was so confident. She had developed her voice in such a way, she didn’t have to worry about it, she didn’t have to be cautious with [her comedy].”
Vetro tells THR he considers Grande this generation’s Judy Garland: “She has the widest range on the planet. She can hear pitch like nobody I know. I used to watch The Ed Sullivan Show… I obviously didn’t get to work with Judy Garland or Elvis Presley, but I got to work on the movies about them. I thought, ‘I’m getting to work with today’s Judy Garland.’ I used to tell her that, and she’s very modest. She would just kind of wave her hand and say, ‘Oh, stop it.'”
When it comes to Chalamet, you might not be surprised to know that the 29-year-old had done a lot of the work before meeting up with Vetro. “He was so deep into that character… What I thought was so extraordinary about what he did was he did capture Bob Dylan, but it wasn’t like a carbon copy or an imitation. He just breathed life into this character that was Bob Dylan.”
Before rehearsing, the pair would ask: Would Bob Dylan warm up his voice? Chalamet did his lessons almost completely in character. It paid off. “Timothée really understood when to accentuate a consonant and when not to. The cadence was a little bit different, the way he scanned a sentence… Even if he’d never heard Bob Dylan say any of those lines that were in the script, he knew exactly where Bob Dylan would stress a certain word. That takes a real, genuine artistry to be able to do that.”
Vetro was approached by BBC Maestro, the online music school that boasts the likes of Mark Ronson and Tim Rice among its instructors, to bring his skills to the rest of the world and not just A-list celebrities on the brink of an Oscar. His online course teaches via bite-size lessons, delving into warm-up techniques, strengthening voice and gaining flexibility, improving vocal range, singing in tune, vocal postures and communicating lyrics.
“I can’t get to work with everybody who wants to work with me,” Vetro says. “Or some people are really shy about singing, and they don’t want anyone to hear them. Now they can do it and no one’s going to hear it. I just thought, this is really great. This is a great way to help all of those people… I feel like the luckiest person on the planet.”
Vetro’s Sing Like the Stars on BBC Maestro can be found here. This story appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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